Celebrating Communism at the New York Times

Front Page ^ | May 3, 2017 | Bruce Bawer

[detective]

On Sunday night I was up late writing, and so on Monday I slept right up until the moment I was awakened, sometime around midday, by the blaring sound of a marching band in the street. I didn't need to look out the window to know what was going on. The music was The Internationale. The date was May 1. In the small Norwegian town where I live, the May Day parade was passing by.   The New York Times commemorated the Communist holiday in its own way – with an essay by Vivian Gornick, now eighty-one, a card-carrying member of the old New York intellectual crowd and author of a 2011 biography of anarchist heroine Emma Goldman. The piece – entitled “When Communism Inspired Americans” – is the latest example of what has long since become a genre all its own: the fond look back at American Stalinism. 

[detective]

Since the 1930's the NYT has written worshipful stories about the killing of millions of innocent people by totalitarian communist regimes.

From Stalin to Pol Pot the NYT has always been inspired by the brutality of the communists.

[SteveO87]

Still unfathomable that the press would be so pro-communist because the press and the intellectuals were usually the first to go in the brutal killings of the communist regimes.

[tbw2]

They need to read the Gulag Archipelago and Miig Pilot.

Lessons Learned from the Gulag Archipelago
https://hubpages.com/politics/Lessons-Learned-from-the-Gulag-Archipelago

[dr_lew]

When I was in grade school in the 1950’s we had May Day celebrations, which included Maypoles, where you weave the pole with two sets of different colored ribbons by having the children move in opposite directions and “weave” in and out. ( It’s easy to do! )

We also had “picnic games.” I remember in particular, and this would be second grade, that there was a “galloping” race, in which I dutifully galloped, but was swamped by the scoffers who simply ran. Of course I tried to protest, but was ignored. It’s seared in my memory!

In the few years after that, after we moved to New Jersey, we had a similar celebration, but it was called “Play Day”, and then of course it was abandoned. Too bad, as this was primal European folk tradtion, AFAIK.